Gadfly Bites 5/8/26—“Inside” the echo chamber, maybe

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1. As I know all of my longtime, long-suffering subscribers remember (Happy Friday greetings to all 8 of you silly sorrowing souls), the main point of Gadfly Bites is to find and catalog Fordham’s own news hits. Your humble clips compiler has gotten so adept at this over more than 10 years of disreputable digging in the depths of media’s digital detritus that even clips that try to disguise their Fordham-related relevance cannot hide from me. The latest case in point, this interview with Jay Plasman, the author of Fordham’s latest research report. I can only assume that the public media folks really liked both the report and Prof. Plasman, because they neglected to mention the name, Fordham’s commissioning of it, or to provide a link to the thing anywhere in their coverage. Sneaky. But after all this time—I get it. (WOSU-FM, Columbus, 5/8/26) Fordham Ohio’s latest research report is called College or Career Readiness? Postsecondary and Labor Market Outcomes for Ohio High School Students Earning Industry-Recognized Credentials, and it can be found here. Was that so hard?
   
   

2. This story purports to take us “inside” one district’s decision to close a school building due to a looming budget shortfall. While it does discuss enrollment losses and unwise pandemic-relief spending—the real reasons districts across the state are facing such money pressures—that info very much comes from outside the district: In the form of OSU Professor and Fordham-Gadfly-adjunct Vlad Kogan. The “inside” story points fingers in any and every other direction. (Ohio Newsroom, 5/6/26)
   
   

3. Kudos to Signal Akron’s Carissa Woytach for a nicely-detailed and fact-focused look at the history of Ohio’s voucher programs. (I had feared the worst since all the photos illustrating the piece come from inside—that word again—the recent You Don’t Hate Vouchers Enough Yet lecture in the Rubber City.) What’s interesting is that because the topic is covered so cleanly, the one voucher groucher quote included for balance actually stands out rather starkly as—to use a technical term—gross: “Overall, I think the voucher program has just gone too far with everything,” says a researcher from Policy Matters Ohio. “It’s no longer for low-income students, it’s no longer for students from districts who are struggling – it is mostly for families who never gave public school a chance.” No parent wants to take chances with their kids’ education, ma’am. And encouraging them to do so for any reason is, as previously noted, gross. (Signal Akron, 5/6/26)

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